Cops rediscover cure for mental illness

The 34-year-old Connecticut woman who was shot and killed by police after a harrowing high-speed chase from the White House to Capitol Hill suffered from post-partum depression, her mother told ABC News.

Miriam Carey, a dental hygienist from Stamford, Conn., was identified as the driver of the black luxury sedan that first rammed a barrier at the White House, then sped to Capitol Hill, defying attempts by armed police to stop her Thursday afternoon. She was shot and killed fleeing her car near the Hart Senate Office Building

I was rapping about this news with a friend. They told me that they had Facebook contacts who made these sort of comments about the event; "Well maybe our government will finally start listening to people about stricter gun control!"

Forget that the woman did not have a gun.

Cars kill more people anyway. Maybe we should have more stringent processes for filtering out maniacs before we let them drive. Most of the drivers I encounter on my way through town are quite literally retarded, and I'm flirting with death at every block.

Is the traffic craziness caused by population density? I moved from high to low and the traffic insanity vanished. It could be a correlation but my experience with urban, suburban and rural areas gives me serious doubts.

My city has a population of 60k, and I spend time living in a more rural area at least 15 miles from a city that size, but I am constantly on high alert because nowhere is safe. Obviously in a more concentrated population you have more retarded drivers in a smaller space but the ratio of sane drivers to retards appears about the same to me.

Telling that a lot of people I spoke to before the identity of the woman was clear thought that she was a white Tea Party type disgruntled NRA fan or something. I predicted a gun toting negro. Now, I can never bring this topic up again

When D.C. resident Nicole Didyk approached the scene, she said she saw "flames on the Mall. ... Not like shooting flames, but the grass was on fire."

Didyk said she saw four or five men with their shirts off, using the clothing to beat out flames that were engulfing a manís body. The men putting out the fire were passersby, she said, and one of them told her that the man had "saluted the Capitol and then lit himself on fire."

Elyn Saks, a mental health law professor at the University of Southern California who also developed schizophrenia as a young adult, said that people with psychosis do not filter stimuli as well as others without the disorder, meaning that they're able to ponder contradictory ideas simultaneously and gain insight into loose associations that the general unconscious brain wouldn't even consider worthy of sending to consciousness.

Insanity can manifest itself in all sorts of people, including the gifted. The world would be better off with those genes (which, for some reason, were never weeded out in prehistory) lest we lose a potential Nietzsche.

Who knows what ultimately caused his breakdown, whether it was syphilis or if he was just a ticking time bomb since birth. But he definitely did suffer from depression, and not the mild existential kind.

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2. Psychosis contributed to his ideas.

When something is an innate part of your mental faculty, it manifests itself in your thoughts and actions whether you are conscious of it or not. So, if our old friend Friedrich did in fact suffer from a form of mental illness, then we can say with certainty that it contributed to or otherwise influenced his thought.

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3. Than in order to save the genes, we need to tolerate their dysfunctional expressions.

Psychiatry has come along way since the days of lobotomies and ECT. Many people afflicted by mental disorders live perfectly normal, dysfunction-free lives with the help of antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, etc, along with behavioral therapy. Is treatment perfect? Obviously no, as evidenced by the recent happenings in DC, but it's good enough to say that successful outcomes aren't uncommon.

But he definitely did suffer from depression, and not the mild existential kind.

What is "depression"? Is it a condition one has from birth? How would you know whether he was "depressed"?

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When something is an innate part of your mental faculty, it manifests itself in your thoughts and actions whether you are conscious of it or not. So, if our old friend Friedrich did in fact suffer from a form of mental illness, then we can say with certainty that it contributed to or otherwise influenced his thought.

Certainly, though do we know whether it contributed to his greatness?

Judging by the amounts of raving lunatics, I'm more inclined to believe great people are great in spite of their dysfunction, not because of it.

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Psychiatry has come along way since the days of lobotomies and ECT. Many people afflicted by mental disorders live perfectly normal, dysfunction-free lives with the help of antidepressants, antipsychotics, mood stabilizers, etc, along with behavioral therapy.

It's indeed a depressing state of affairs when being on unproven and damaging drugs is considered a state of normalcy.

I've heard mentioned a few times, both in academic psychology classes, and I think even on this site, that the depressed have a somewhat more accurate picture of reality. Also I know several people who suffer from psychosis, all of whom I consider to be extremely intelligent. I have a biased view, since as an intelligent, somewhat mentally ill person, I may have a higher opinion of such people and also interact more with such people. But I am almost offended that the mentally ill would be put down on here. C'mon people!

As for medication... I do not really like the idea of it. Even health professionals will sometimes voice negative opinions of a lot of medications. They might get rid of some aspects of you, but like anti-biotics, if you suppress the 'bad' you will also suppress the 'good', and ultimately fix nothing unless you take the right initiative yourself. Also, I believe medications are mostly aimed at combatting positive symptoms rather than negative ones, so if illness is preventing you from motivating yourself to go through the woodworks of life... then medications are not likely to help, I don't think. They might stop overly negative emotions, delusional thoughts, because they just suppress such things.

Also, as for the article that the topic is about, can I just get clarified... did she get shot AFTER SHE LEFT HER CAR???